Submission period: either one week from today at the time of this posting, or 24 hours from when I announce the ninth submission here.

1. Pick two (and only two) of the four terms to be central concepts for your game. This is a big deal. You can’t win a Ronny unless I think they really matter. Make sure to exclude the other two terms, conceptually.

2. Write the game during a single 24-hour period. Remember, this is an alpha design and will be assessed as such.

3. Submit it in PDF to the 24 Hour RPG site and<My best design adviceFree associate off the two terms to find more terms of your own to include, but remember, the original two do have to be central in some way.Make something you like, and present both the Color and the Reward to help the reader understand why.

Some minor pointsIt's OK to write something more traditional and/or long-term. Not everything has to be formally turn-based and rife with endgames and full of emotional mechanics.

Feel free to do a little bit of document design to spice up the reading. Nothing major – a font, or layout device, or some quickie illustrations or images … I promise not to use such things as criteria for Ronnies judgment, but they do make the whole thing more fun for everyone. (See the 2005 entries January’s Frost, Left Coast, and Bylina & Bogatyr, for instance.)

And finally, the terms for this round:

whisper wings murder morning

Vroom vroom!

See the sticky thread leading this forum and Questions, concerns, befuddlements for various nuances and details. If you’re still curious or confused about something, ask it here in this thread.

Hi Ron. About to start work on an idea for this one (Using wings and whisper, oddly enough) and I had an inexperience-based question. Would 'author's comments' in the book (or at the end) be useful or detrimental? On one hand in bad sections they might aid in showing where I went wrong. On the other hand the game should be able to stand on it's own and my thoughts can be brought in during the discussion/rewriting phase.

Thanks muchly for providing a reason for me to get off my butt and get back to active game design.

I don't know which entries are more disturbing, the funny ones or the goth ones. You are a bunch of morbid sonofabitches out there, I tell you. It serves me right for including "skull" in the previous round and "murder" in this one. I know! The next terms will include, let's see, "atrocity." No, "torture." Oh, obviously: "death," that'll cheer things up.

I think it has a lot to do with triangulation. That's why I insist on fully excluding the two terms that aren't used and remind people to free-associate new terms.

More than any other round of the Ronnies, it pleases me to imagine some kind of boxed cover that holds books spine-out, containing all the entries for this round in one glorious collection of separate volumes, once each is brought to conceptual fruition. The games are diverse in all sorts of ways, yet there is some kind of shadowy, aerial, ethereal, gore-spattered unity to them which no single title fully encompasses. The strong motifs across them - angels most obviously - only contribute to the unity rather than define it. Even the comedy in some of them is weird and dark in a way which contributes as well.